Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live web cam on the summit of near 13,800 foot Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This web cam is available during the daylight hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon shining down during the night at times. Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset too… depending upon weather conditions.

Aloha Paragraphs

Reflections…sun, ocean, palms an clouds in a clear blue sky

Continued light winds, with slightly cooler north to
northeast breezes into the new week

A couple of weak cold fronts will bring a few showers during the upcoming work week…then the chance of a
heavy rain producing cold front arriving next weekend

The following numbers represent the most recent top wind gusts (mph), along with directions…as of Saturday evening:

Light breezes giving way to light to moderately strong north to northeast winds Monday through Wednesday…bringing slightly cooler temperatures to our area. Here’s the latestweather map, showing the Hawaiian Islands, and the rest of the North Pacific Ocean. Here’s a real-time wind profile of the central Pacific…centered on the Hawaiian Islands. ~~~ We find a northeast to southwest oriented low pressure trough near Kauai. There’s a low pressure system far north of the state, with the tail-end of its associated cold front…just to the north of Hawaii. Meanwhile, we see high pressure systems well offshore to the west and northeast of the state. These high pressure cells have elongated ridges of high pressure extending east and west into the area northwest and northeast of the state. Winds will generally be on the light side, with gradually returning north to northeast winds after this weekend…bringing a slight cooling trend.Satellite imageryshows a weak band of low clouds near Kauai, with the rest of the state generally clear to partly cloudy…although with clouds over the mountains on Maui and the Big Island. The clouds near Kauai are associated with this area of low pressure near that western most island in the chain. Here’s thelooping radar image, showing moderate showers over the ocean to the west of Kauai, and over the Koolau Mountains on Oahu…with a few more along the slopes of Maui and the Big Island. Looking at this largersatellite image, which is in the looping mode, we can see those brighter white clouds, with some heavy showers, moving away from the islands towards the northeast. There are also those rainy clouds far south and southeast of us, down in the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ).

We’re likely to see the arrival of a couple of weak and shallow cold fronts during the new week, the first Tuesday morning, the second Thursday morning…although neither will be significant. Looking further ahead, the models are suggesting that a stronger cold front will approach the state from the northwest Friday into next weekend. The front may bring locally heavy rain, along with some flooding possible too. There are apt to be gusty winds coming from the south through southwest ahead of this cold front starting later Thursday or early Friday as well. This outlook is still pretty far out into the future, and thus, fine tuning will be necessary on the exact circumstances. However at the moment, the models are showing all the necessary ingredients for a good rainstorm next Saturday and Sunday. I’ll have much more to say about this situation as we move forward. I’ll be back Sunday morning with your next new weather narrative, I hope you have a great Saturday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Here on Maui, at the 3,100 foot elevation, at my upper Kula, Maui weather tower, the air temperature was 54F degrees at 705amon this Saturday morning. Skies are totally clear, with just a small amount of haze residing in the Central Valley. Stretching my neck around, I can’t see any clouds in my view, which is nice way to start off the day. As I noted above, we’ll find increasing clouds over and around the mountains later this morning, through the afternoon hours. These clouds will likely drop showers over both the West Maui Mountains, and over the Haleakala Crater too.

~~~ I’m back online again, as I lost my internet connectivity through most of the day. It’s now 405pm, under mostly cloudy skies, with lots of volcanic haze in our area too. There’s been a couple of light showers this afternoon, although nothing significant. The air temperature is 69.1 degrees, with a little light breeze.

~~~ We’re into the early evening hours now, at 545pm, under clouds and light fog, although with no rain. The air temperature is 68.5 degrees, with zero wind of any kind. Now at near 6pm, we have had pea soup fog roll in over my house, which brings a lovely stillness with it.

Friday Evening Film: This time around it’s a film that’s just pure action…nothin’ but! The critics are just about split down the middle, with a 49% liking it, while 64% of the audience viewers are thumbs up. It’s called Robocop, starring Joel Kinnaman, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Abbie Cornish and Marianne Jean-Baptis. The synopsis: In this film, the year is 2028 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Overseas, their drones have been used by the military for years – and it’s meant billions for OmniCorp’s bottom line. Now OmniCorp wants to bring their controversial technology to the home front, and they see a golden opportunity to do it. When Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) – a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit – is critically injured in the line of duty, OmniCorp sees their chance to build a part-man, part-robot police officer. OmniCorp envisions a RoboCop in every city and even more billions for their shareholders, but they never counted on one thing: there is still a man inside the machine pursuing justice.

I ended up seeing this film with four other friends, all of whom are intelligent, open minded people. I think most of us were looking forward to seeing this film, and had reasonably high expectations. There was one of us that found it terrible, and her first response upon leaving the theater was to give it a D- grade! The rest of us had better feelings about the film, with most of the grades coming in right around the B level for the most part. This film was totally a sci-fi thriller, with what I considered good acting. It was far from being one of the best films of the season, far…although I was personally entertained very adequately…no doubt about it. The special effects were very engaging, and I walked away from it feeling like the film hit the mark…in terms of what I was expecting. My personal grade for Robocop was a solid B, with no minus or plus involved. Just in case you’re interested, here’s the trailer for this film.

Interesting:Experts develop low-cost solar panels by recycling rare metals – Swedish firm Midsummer, a leading supplier of production lines for cost effective manufacturing of flexible thin film CIGS solar cells, has developed a unique process to recover leftover rare metals such as indium and gallium when manufacturing thin film CIGS solar cells. The unique process will extensively reduce thin film CIGS manufacturing material costs.

In close co-operation with Professor Christian Ekberg and PhD-student Anna Gustafsson at the Swedish Chalmers University of Technology, Midsummer has developed a unique process to recycle the CIGS-material that does not end up on the solar cell. The process recovers the material that is left from the sputtering targets (30 to 40 per cent) and what ends up on the masks in the machine.

“Normally when recycling these kinds of materials you usually melt down the materials unrefined. But this new and unique method is far subtler as the process makes it possible to remove all the selenium before dissolving the material in its components with various acids,” said Sven Lindström, CEO, Midsummer. “Gallium and Indium are expensive rare earth materials and this unique process makes it possible for us to drastically reduce the material costs while at the same time conserve the earth’s limited resources”.

The unique feature of this process is that it removes selenium by oxygen and thus makes it easier to process the remaining oxidized metals. This is very good as selenium may in some reactions create toxic gases.

“The CIGS material is ground to a powder and oxygen is allowed to flow over the material”, said Anna Gustafsson, PhD-student at the Swedish Chalmers University of Technology. “The method allows SeO2 to be formed and all the selenium is separated from the metals. The separated selenium can then be reformed at very high purity (over 5N purity, 99.999%) so it can easily be reused in the solar cell production process without further purification”.

Midsummer has recently developed a high-efficient process for cadmium-free CIGS on stainless steel with sputtering. By using sputtering in all processing steps, the process cycles in the manufacturing of solar cells can be drastically shortened, the solar cells can be made cadmium-free and also made on stainless steel substrates suitable for light weight flexible modules — all contributing to a highly competitive method to manufacture thin film CIGS cells with high efficiencies. The process is a completely dry process and also an all-vacuum process, with less stringent requirements for clean-rooms etc.

Aloha from Sydney Australia ………wonderful site use it all the time both here and at our place in Kapalua. Great to see the snow on Mauna Kea but the usual live cam is not working. Hope it’s back on line soon. The ITCZ is down over the north of Australia at the moment and consequently Sydney is being influenced by a large High Pressure system funneling cooler air from the south and lower than expected humidity. It’s a bit like Kapalua when the Trades are really blowing,
Thanks again Glenn….~~~Hi Doug, wow, writing all the way from Syndey…the other side of the earth it seems. I can see the cam is working again, with patchy snow up there at sunset. Great to hear about the weather down there in the southern hemisphere. We have some slightly cooler air coming in here too, although not from the Antarctic, rather the arctic…more or less at least. You are very welcome, I’m glad you stay tuned into the weather here in the Hawaiian Islands…using this website. Aloha, Glenn

Am feeling the 80% humidity this morning in Huelo, but maybe that is because I was in Minneapolis last week.~~~Hi David, the Relative humidity at the Kahului airport is 64% at the moment, although you would feel more moist out there on the windward side. Welcome back! Aloha, Glenn

Aloha Glenn, thanks for all your excellent information! I use your site constantly for my work and accurate forecasting!! But please keep us updated on this “good old fashioned rainstorm” heading for us this weekend, since my lovely fiance and I are getting married on monday march 3rd, and have tons of events this weekend. much Aloha!~~~Hi Timothy, congratulations on your upcoming special event, very special event! I will be updating this possibility everyday, even several times a day. As things develop, or not, I’ll let you know for sure. Aloha, Glenn